After “Revenge of the Mekons” received its world premiere at the DOC NYC festival last year, several of the principals took part in a late-night question-and-answer session at the SVA Theater in Chelsea. The director, Joe Angio, who spent six years making the insightful documentary, pointed out some people in the crowd who appear in it, including the novelist Jonathan Franzen and Craig Finn, leader of the Hold Steady.

The customary pleasantries ended when a few of the Mekons began to comment. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” the drummer, Steve Goulding, said. Sally Timms, a singer, expressed doubt that any filmmaker could accurately depict the experience of being in a band. Then the singer and guitarist Jon Langford made some mock-derisive comments about Mr. Goulding.

So much for supporting the biggest marketing opportunity of the group’s 37-year career.

This blend of epistemological skepticism and slapstick comedy sums up what fans cherish about the Mekons, one of rock’s longest-running commercially unsuccessful groups. Founded in 1977 at the University of Leeds, the band initially had limited musical skills, which is a comic refrain of the film. Mr. Langford recalls being asked, “Do you want to be in a band where no one can play?’ ”

He also tells an anecdote about Bob Last, an architecture student and roadie who offered to release a single on his budding independent label, Fast Product, and sealed the deal by announcing: “I don’t want a proper band. I want the Mekons.”

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The Mekons in 1987.CreditJohn Ingledew/Music Box Films

Mr. Angio, 54, considers himself “a relative latecomer” to the Mekons because he didn’t see them perform until the mid-’90s. For the movie, his second full-length documentary — his first was “How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It),” a profile of the filmmaker and provocateur Melvin Van Peebles — he had originally planned to profile Yo La Tengo. He courted the band for around 18 months. “They never said no, but more importantly, they never said yes,” he said in an interview.

After giving up on that idea in 2007, he started flipping through his alphabetized collection of albums and CDs. “I got to the M’s, and it was like: Eureka, the Mekons! They’re an even better story,” Mr. Angio said. To his relief, Mr. Langford, a member of the original lineup, replied quickly to an email. (“Revenge of the Mekons” opens on Wednesday at Film Forum, followed by a symposium on the band at Columbia University on Thursday.)

Some band members, especially Ms. Timms, who joined in the mid-1980s, were opposed to making the documentary. “I’d say Joe’s perseverance made it happen,” she said somewhat admiringly by phone from Chicago. “He just kept showing up and filming us.”

Mr. Angio followed the band while it wrote and recorded an album, “Ancient and Modern: 1911-2011” (Bloodshot), and on a highly unglamorous tour of Britain. (There are shots of the members lugging their own gear and shuffling through the parking lot of a Days Inn.) “I’m amazed Joe was able to finish the film,” Mr. Langford said. “We’re not the easiest people to track down and work with.”

In interviews with current and former band members and admirers, Mr. Angio chronicles the band’s creation by socialist fine art students, its embrace of mutated country and folk music, a brief (and doomed) relationship with a major label and its reasons for persisting in a career that has never risen above obscurity, or below an intelligent truculence. The Mekons are often referred to as a cult band, and he makes it clear what that means. Ed Roche, the manager of Quarterstick, an independent label that has released more than a dozen of the band’s albums, says that a “good-selling” Mekons record amounts to about 8,000 copies.

Similarly, Mr. Angio knew there would be a limited audience for his film. But he felt encouraged by the press attention drawn by “Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me,” last year’s documentary about an obscure ’70s band from Memphis. Three of Big Star’s original four band members are dead, so when Mr. Angio was shopping “Revenge of the Mekons” to distributors, one said, “Kill a few band members, and we’ll talk.”

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Joe Angio, director of “Revenge of the Mekons.”CreditMusic Box Films

Mr. Angio understood that the Mekons’ between-song badinage was part of their appeal. In the film, they’re onstage in Leicester, England, when they learn that a gig in Sheffield has been canceled because of poor ticket sales. A series of self-deprecating wisecracks ensues.

The singer-songwriter Steve Earle said in an interview: “I like their records a lot, but their breathtaking medium is the live shows. They’re hilarious, and they finish each other’s sentences better than any band I’ve ever seen.”

In the film, Mr. Angio also shows how band members support themselves with nonmusic careers. Being in the Mekons “is like a glorified hobby, in the sense of what we get paid,” Ms. Timms said. “But everybody in the band is middle class. They’re all homeowners. I have a pretty well-paid full-time job as a paralegal.”

Mr. Angio’s situation in some ways parallels theirs: He made the Van Peebles documentary when he was the editor in chief of Time Out New York, and while making “Mekons,” he worked part-time as an editor and director for Time Inc.’s content marketing unit. The film costs were roughly $100,000, he said, and his financial ambitions are modest. “I’d like to recoup my expenses, and then maybe a little something beyond that,” he said. “What would the salary be for something that took six years?”

Mr. Angio said that many music documentaries err by appealing to an existing clique of fans, so “Revenge of the Mekons” also functions as an introduction to the uninitiated. “I think there’s a potential for them to become more popular,” he said. But it’s not like the Mekons to be hopeful about the chance of sudden popularity after 37 years.

Mr. Langford said: “I think a lot of young people are going to illegally download our music. That’s my prediction. We’ll get wildly popular with a new generation of fans who know how to get their music for nothing.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: The Cult Band That Keeps on Chugging. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe